A kernel-based framework for medical big-data analytics

The recent trend towards standardization of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) represents a significant opportunity and challenge for medical big-data analytics. The challenge typically arises from the nature of the data which may be heterogeneous, sparse, very high-dimensional, incomplete and inaccurate. Of these, standard pattern recognition methods can typically address issues of high-dimensionality, sparsity and inaccuracy. The remaining issues of incompleteness and heterogeneity however are problematic; data can be as diverse as handwritten notes, blood-pressure readings and MR scans, and typically very little of this data will be co-present for each patient at any given time interval. We therefore advocate a kernel-based framework as being most appropriate for handling these issues, using the neutral point substitution method to accommodate missing inter-modal data. For pre-processing of image-based MR data we advocate a Deep Learning solution for contextual areal segmentation, with edit-distance based kernel measurement then used to characterize relevant morphology

Image processing system based on similarity/dissimilarity measures to classify binary images from contour-based features

Image Processing Systems (IPS) try to solve tasks like image classification or segmentation based on its content. Many authors proposed a variety of techniques to tackle the image classification task. Plenty of methods address the performance of the IPS [1], as long as the influence of many external circumstances, such as illumination, rotation, and noise [2]. However, there is an increasing interest in classifying shapes from binary images (BI). Shape Classification (SC) from BI considers a segmented image as a sample (backgroundsegmentation [3]) and aims to identify objects based in its shape..

Image processing system based on similarity/dissimilarity measures to classify binary images from contour-based features

Image Processing Systems (IPS) try to solve tasks like image classification or segmentation based on its content. Many authors proposed a variety of techniques to tackle the image classification task. Plenty of methods address the performance of the IPS [1], as long as the influence of many external circumstances, such as illumination, rotation, and noise [2]. However, there is an increasing interest in classifying shapes from binary images (BI). Shape Classification (SC) from BI considers a segmented image as a sample (backgroundsegmentation [3]) and aims to identify objects based in its shape..

Arbitrary Keyword Spotting in Handwritten Documents

Despite the existence of electronic media in today’s world, a considerable amount of written communications is in paper form such as books, bank cheques, contracts, etc. There is an increasing demand for the automation of information extraction, classification, search, and retrieval of documents. The goal of this research is to develop a complete methodology for the spotting of arbitrary keywords in handwritten document images. We propose a top-down approach to the spotting of keywords in document images. Our approach is composed of two major steps: segmentation and decision. In the former, we generate the word hypotheses. In the latter, we decide whether a generated word hypothesis is a specific keyword or not. We carry out the decision step through a two-level classification where first, we assign an input image to a keyword or non-keyword class; and then transcribe the image if it is passed as a keyword. By reducing the problem from the image domain to the text domain, we do not only address the search problem in handwritten documents, but also the classification and retrieval, without the need for the transcription of the whole document image. The main contribution of this thesis is the development of a generalized minimum edit distance for handwritten words, and to prove that this distance is equivalent to an Ergodic Hidden Markov Model (EHMM). To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to present an exact 2D model for the temporal information in handwriting while satisfying practical constraints. Some other contributions of this research include: 1) removal of page margins based on corner detection in projection profiles; 2) removal of noise patterns in handwritten images using expectation maximization and fuzzy inference systems; 3) extraction of text lines based on fast Fourier-based steerable filtering; 4) segmentation of characters based on skeletal graphs; and 5) merging of broken characters based on graph partitioning. Our experiments with a benchmark database of handwritten English documents and a real-world collection of handwritten French documents indicate that, even without any word/document-level training, our results are comparable with two state-of-the-art word spotting systems for English and French documents

Deformation Based Curved Shape Representation

Representation and modelling of an objects' shape is critical in object recognition, synthesis, tracking and many other applications in computer vision. As a result, there is a wide range of approaches in formulating representation space and quantifying the notion of similarity between shapes. A similarity metric between shapes is a basic building block in modelling shape categories, optimizing shape valued functionals, and designing a classifier. Consequently, any subsequent shape based computation is fundamentally dependent on the computational efficiency, robustness, and invariance to shape preserving transformations of the defined similarity metric. In this thesis, we propose a novel finite dimensional shape representation framework that leads to a computationally efficient, closed form solution, and noise tolerant similarity distance function. Several important characteristics of the proposed curved shape representation approach are discussed in relation to earlier works. Subsequently, two different solutions are proposed for optimal parameter estimation of curved shapes. Hence, providing two possible solutions for the point correspondence estimation problem between two curved shapes. Later in the thesis, we show that several statistical models can readily be adapted to the proposed shape representation framework for object category modelling. The thesis finalizes by exploring potential applications of the proposed curved shape representation in 3D facial surface and facial expression representation and modelling

Feature design and lexicon reduction for efficient offline handwriting recognition

This thesis establishes a pattern recognition framework for offline word recognition systems. It focuses on the image level features because they greatly influence the recognition performance. In particular, we consider two complementary aspects of prominent features impact: lexicon reduction and the actual recognition. The first aspect, lexicon reduction, consists in the design of a weak classifier which outputs a set of candidate word hypotheses given a word image. Its main purpose is to reduce the recognition computational time while maintaining (or even improving) the recognition rate. The second aspect is the actual recognition system itself. In fact, several features exist in the literature based on different fields of research, but no consensus exists concerning the most promising ones. The goal of the proposed framework is to improve our understanding of relevant features in order to build better recognition systems. For this purpose, we addressed two specific problems: 1) feature design for lexicon reduction (application to Arabic script), and 2) feature evaluation for cursive handwriting recognition (application to Latin and Arabic scripts). Few methods exist for lexicon reduction in Arabic script, unlike Latin script. Existing methods use salient features of Arabic words such as the number of subwords and diacritics, but totally ignore the shape of the subwords. Therefore, our first goal is to perform lexicon reductionn based on subwords shape. Our approach is based on shape indexing, where the shape of a query subword is compared to a labeled database of sample subwords. For efficient comparison with a low computational overhead, we proposed the weighted topological signature vector (W-TSV) framework, where the subword shape is modeled as a weighted directed acyclic graph (DAG) from which the W-TSV vector is extracted for efficient indexing. The main contributions of this work are to extend the existing TSV framework to weighted DAG and to propose a shape indexing approach for lexicon reduction. Good performance for lexicon reduction is achieved for Arabic subwords. Nevertheless, the performance remains modest for Arabic words. Considering the results of our first work on Arabic lexicon reduction, we propose to build a new index for better performance at the word level. The subword shape and the number of subwords and diacritics are all important components of Arabic word shape. We therefore propose the Arabic word descriptor (AWD) which integrates all the aforementioned components. It is built in two steps. First, a structural descriptor (SD) is computed for each connected component (CC) of the word image. It describes the CC shape using the bag-of-words model, where each visual word represents a different local shape structure. Then, the AWD is formed by concatenating the SDs using an efficient heuristic, implicitly discriminating between subwords and diacritics. In the context of lexicon reduction, the AWD is used to index a reference database. The main contribution of this work is the design of the AWD, which integrates lowlevel cues (subword shape structure) and symbolic information (subword counts and diacritics) into a single descriptor. The proposed method has a low computational overhead, it is simple to implement and it provides state-of-the-art performance for lexicon reduction on two Arabic databases, namely the Ibn Sina database of subwords and the IFN/ENIT database of words. The last part of this thesis focuses on features for word recognition. A large body of features exist in the literature, each of them being motivated by different fields, such as pattern recognition, computer vision or machine learning. Identifying the most promising approaches would improve the design of the next generation of features. Nevertheless, because they are based on different concepts, it is difficult to compare them on a theoretical ground and efficient empirical tools are needed. Therefore, the last objective of the thesis is to provide a method for feature evaluation that assesses the strength and complementarity of existing features. A combination scheme has been designed for this purpose, in which each feature is evaluated through a reference recognition system, based on recurrent neural networks. More precisely, each feature is represented by an agent, which is an instance of the recognition system trained with that feature. The decisions of all the agents are combined using a weighted vote. The weights are jointly optimized during a training phase in order to increase the weighted vote of the true word label. Therefore, they reflect the strength and complementarity of the agents and their features for the given task. Finally, they are converted into a numerical score assigned to each feature, which is easy to interpret under this combination model. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first feature evaluation method able to quantify the importance of each feature, instead of providing a ranking based on the recognition rate. Five state-of-the-art features have been tested, and our results provide interesting insight for future feature design